Open Minds Expo: Storytelling as a Gateway Drug: Some of my Psychedelic Story

Note: The following is from a talk I gave at the Open Minds Expo in Denver Colorado in November of 2024. Big thank you to the organizers for inviting me to speak!

Maybe you can relate. I used to joke that my family put the “fun” in dysfunctional. But the truth is, it usually wasn’t fun and it really wasn’t a joke. That pun was me making light of my personal and ancestral nightmare. Later I applied that very same remark to more than one messy romantic relationship or one-sided friendship. Like many pithy quips, it was an attempt to act like my pain didn’t matter. That I was over it somehow. That it was all in the past, that I’d moved on, and that I didn't give a damn anymore. 

But the thing is: I still gave a damn. A lot of them, in fact. Yes, I still cared. Deeply. 

While outwardly I was reasonably successful, educated, and sometimes even the life of a party, inside I often felt alone, confused, and in turmoil. My personal life reflected this, and, in the interest of time, I’ll save those cringey details for my memoir. 

One of my first big psychedelic journeys with ayahuasca carried many profound, life-changing messages. One of the main ones? That it’s okay to care. That it is indeed beautiful and necessary and yes, sometimes inconvenient and complicated to give a damn. That care applies to tending to myself and as well as to others. Shoutout to my codependents on this next one: Caring about others was something I found pretty easy and intuitive. Yet something was missing; For all of my attunement to others, I felt empty inside…lost at times within myself. That’s because in focusing so much on others, I was conveniently hiding out from myself. This is what I’d learned to do in order to survive. 

This hiding from me meant that my authenticity wasn’t fully available to anyone–myself included. And I believe this led to me often feeling unmet by many of the people in my life. Sometimes even those who really were capable of meeting me. I’d find ways to push them away. Numerous medicine journeys showed me that feeling unmet by others was in part mirroring ways in which I wasn’t meeting myself. Part of why that was happening is that I had disowned parts of myself. Pushing away the parts of me I felt were unsavory, bad, and ugly fed my feeling unworthy of my own self love. I could not recall a time when I hadn't felt unworthy, somehow broken, and like damaged goods.

Enter psychedelics. At the time I felt the call to this work, I sensed I was hitting against the limit of what years of psychotherapy, decades of yoga, and a regular meditation practice could yield.

So back to that part about wanting others to care about me? That was the difficult part for me. To even allow myself to feel this desire for love required a level of vulnerability and tenderness that I had learned to keep under lockdown in my heart. 

And yet medicine reassured me that it’s okay to let people know how I want to be loved and cared for. That I am neither too much or not enough. It reminded me that it’s important to walk away or at least make major adjustments if someone shows that they are unwilling and unable to show up for me and for themselves in the ways we all deserve. That it’s okay to allow myself to feel the heartbreak of all of this. That allowing myself to feel whatever emerges is really the only way I’ll ever alchemize any of it. 

Psychedelics showed me where I’d been hiding all of these years. They lovingly called me forward into being my fuller self. And they showed me that by being true to myself, I was serving others who longed to be truer to themselves. That by staying small and shrunken, I was serving no one. That watering down my voice was a form of drowning out my own potential. The medicine called me fiercely forward–to be more, not less of myself. Shadow parts and all. 

With humor, gentleness, and clarity, psychedelics reminded me of my power. They helped me move into deeper inner, spiritual territory than I’d been able to at my previous capacity. Indeed, I began to process deeply held trauma, including sexual trauma and the shame so intertwined with it. They even graced me at times with embodied moments of healing pleasure that help more fully heal and integrate elements of my spiritual, erotic nature. 

I feel like that night, I saw myself clearly, maybe for the very first time. I saw and felt and embodied me without the layers of shame, guilt, and fear. In truth, I know I was remembering. And that’s what psychedelics do. They help us remember the truth of who we are underneath all of the conditioning, stories, and roles that have been put upon us and the masks we ourselves have felt we needed to wear to survive. 

So yes, I connected to the essence of myself. And I’ve never forgotten. This work has profoundly changed me. And that woman, that girl, that human, that spirit I finally reconnected with after a lifetime? Oh how I’d missed her.

Within months of beginning this era of psychedelic work, I said goodbye to several relationships that lacked vulnerability, deeper love, and care. I left a job that was choking the life out of me. Yes, some of these changes felt scary and stressful. And I now had a deep knowing that staying in those dynamics was abandoning myself, and I intend to never do that again. I started graduate school and earned a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling. I softly and playfully entered into a loving, safe romantic connection that has proven healing, celebratory, and delightful, even when we face challenges. I am more fully myself now than I have ever been, and it feels so freeing. 

There’s an adage that research is mesearch, and that seems to apply at least in part to my choice to become a psychotherapist specializing in relational and sex therapy who also helps people prepare for and integrate psychedelic journeys. 

We live in a time where we are often encouraged to forget who we are and who and what we stand for. When the words divide and conquer apply–they apply to our society and culture and communities just as much as they apply to how we relate with ourselves. Make no mistake, my life isn’t perfect. I still struggle at times with my emotions and have plenty of ongoing growth to do. The difference now is that I have my own back in ways I never did before. Through my psychedelic journeys, I’ve found that turning towards, not away, from all of the parts of me, is the path.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Carl Jung that I believe carries so much hope, should we choose to interpret it that way. “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will drive your life and you will call it fate.” 

I wish you much healing, connection and wholeness on your own path.

Please check out my recent guest spot on the Psychedelics Today podcast and my Sex and Psychedelics 101 online starter class.

Thank you,

Bria Tavakoli